Then, the visions crumbling, the flames falling, a chaos of mere feeling overwhelmed her. It was as though her blood were running backward, knotting itself in clots of darkness and agony. He had sent her away unlovingly—punishing her for her fidelity. Her love for Tante destroyed his love for her. He must have known her pain; yet he could speak like that to her; look like that. The tears rose to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as she lay straightly in the bed, on her back, the clothes drawn to her throat, her hands clasped tightly on her breast. Hours had passed and here she lay alone.
Hours had passed and she heard at last his careful step along the passage, and the shock of it tingled through her with a renewal of fear and irrepressible joy. He opened, carefully, the dressing-room door. She listened, stilling her breaths.
He would come to her. They would speak together. He would not leave her when she was so unhappy. Even the thought of Tante's wrongs was effaced by the fear and yearning, and, as the bedroom door opened and Gregory came in, her heart seemed to lift and dissolve in a throb of relief and blissfulness.
But, with her joy, the thought of Tante hovered like a heavy darkness above her eyes, keeping them closed. She lay still, ashamed of so much gladness, yet knowing that if he took her in his arms her arms could but close about him.
The stillness deceived Gregory. In the dim light from the dressing-room he saw her, as he thought, sleeping placidly, her broad braids lying along the sheet.
He looked at her for a moment. Then, not stooping to her, he turned away.
If only, Gregory often felt, in thinking it over and over in the days of outer unity and inner estrangement that followed, she had not been able to go to sleep so placidly.
All resentment had faded from his heart when he went in to her. He had longed for reconciliation and for reassurance. But as he had looked at the seeming calm of Karen's face his tenderness and compunction passed into a bitter consciousness of frustrated love. Her calm was like a repulse. Their personal estrangement and misunderstanding left her unmoved. She had said what she had to say to him; she had vindicated her guardian; and now she slept, unmindful of him. He asked himself, and for the first time clearly and steadily, as he lay awake for hours afterwards in the little dressing-room bed, whether Karen's feelings for him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted, unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment grasped him; but the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness, the romance that she so supremely personified for him, surged too strongly against the barrier of her mute, unanswering face, for him to feel temperately and weigh fairly. There was a lack in her, and because of it she hurt him thus cruelly.
They met next morning over a mutual misinterpretation, and, with a sense of mingled discord and relief, found themselves kissing and smiling as if nothing had happened. Pride sustained them; the hope that, since the other seemed so unconscious, a hurt dealt so unconsciously need not, for pride's sake, be resented; the fear that explanation or protest might emphasise estrangement. The easiest thing to do was to go on acting as if nothing had happened. Karen poured out his coffee and questioned him about the latest political news. He helped her to eggs and bacon and took an interest in her letters.
And since it was easiest to begin so, it was easiest so to go on. The routine of their shared life blurred for them the sharp realisations of the night. But while the fact that such suffering had come to them was one that could, perhaps, be lived down, the fact that they did not speak of it spread through all their life with a strange, new savour.
Karen went to her ducal week-end; but she did not, when she came back from it, regale her husband with her usual wealth of detailed description. She could no longer assume the air of happy confidence where Tante and her doings with Tante were concerned. That air of determined cheerfulness, that pretence that nothing was really the matter and that Tante and Gregory were bound to get on together if she took it for granted that they would, had broken down. There was relief for Gregory, though relief of a chill, grey order, in seeing that Karen had accepted the fact that he and Tante were not to get on. Yet he smarted from the new sense of being shut out from her life.
It was he who assumed the air; he who pretended that nothing was the matter. He questioned her genially about the visit, and Karen answered all his questions as genially. Yes; it had been very nice; the great house sometimes very beautiful and sometimes very ugly; the beauty seemed, in a funny way, almost as accidental as the ugliness. The people had been very interesting to look at; so many slender pretty women; there were no fat women and no ugly women at all, or, if they were, they contrived not to look it. It all seemed perfectly arranged.
Had she talked to many of them? Gregory asked. Had she come across anybody she liked? Karen shook her head. She had liked them all—to look at—but it had gone no further than that; she had talked very little with any of them; and, soberly, unemphatically, she had added: "They were all too much occupied with Tante—or with each other—to think much of me. I was the only one not slender and not beautiful!"
Gregory asked who had taken her in to dinner on the two nights, and masked ironic inner comments when he heard that on Saturday it had been a young actor who, she thought, had been a little cross at having her as his portion. "He didn't try to talk to me; nor I to him, when I found that he was cross," she said. "I didn't like him at all. He had fat cheeks and very shrewd black eyes." On Sunday it had been a young son of the house, a boy at Eton. "Very, very dear and nice. We had a great talk about climbing Swiss mountains, which I have done a good deal, you know."
Tante, it appeared, had had the ambassador on Saturday and the Duke himself on Sunday. And she and Tante, as usual, had had great fun in their own rooms every night, talking everybody over when the day was done. Karen said nothing to emphasise the contrast between the duke's friends and Gregory's, but she couldn't have failed to draw her comparison. Here was amondewhere Tante was fully appreciated. That she herself had not been was not a matter to engage her thoughts. But it engaged Gregory's. The position in which she had been placed was a further proof to him of Tante's lack of consideration. Where Karen was placed depended, precisely, he felt sure of it, on where Madame von Marwitz wished her to be placed. It was as the little camp-follower that she had taken her.
After this event came a pause in the fortunes of our young couple. Madame von Marwitz, with Mrs. Forrester, went to Paris to give her two concerts there and was gone for a fortnight. In this fortnight he and Karen resumed, though warily, as it were, some old customs. They read their political economy again in the evenings when they did not go out, and he found her at tea-time waiting for him as she had used to do. She shared his life; she was gentle and thoughtful; yet she had never been less near. He felt that she guarded herself against admissions. To come near now would be to grant that it had been Tante's presence that had parted them.
She wrote to Madame von Marwitz, and heard from her, constantly. Madame von Marwitz sent her presents from Paris; a wonderful white silk dressing-gown; a box of chocolate; a charming bit of old enamel picked up in arive gauchecuriosity shop. Then one day she wrote to say that Tallie had been quite ill—povera vecchia—and would Karen be a kind, kind child and run down and see her at Les Solitudes.
Gregory had not forgotten the plan for having Mrs. Talcott with them that winter and had reminded Karen of it, but it appeared then that she had not forgotten, either; had indeed, spoken to Tante of it; but that Tante had not seemed to think it a good plan. Tante said that Mrs. Talcott did not like leaving Les Solitudes; and, moreover, that she herself, might be going down there for the inside of a week at any moment and Karen knew how Tallie would hate the idea of not being on the spot to prepare for her. Let them postpone the idea of a visit; at all events until she was no longer in England.
Gregory now suggested that Karen might bring Mrs. Talcott back with her. There was some guile in the suggestion. Encircling this little oasis of peace where he and Karen could, at all events, draw their breaths, were storms and arid wastes. Madame von Marwitz would soon be back. She might even be thinking of redeeming her promise of coming to stay with them. If old Mrs. Talcott, slightly invalided, could be installed before the great woman's return, she might keep her out for the rest of her stay in London, and must, certainly, keep Karen in to a greater extent than when she had no guest to entertain.
Karen could not suspect his motive; he saw that from her frank look of pleasure. She promised to do her best. It was worth while, he reflected, to lose her for a few days if she were to bring back such a bulwark as Mrs. Talcott might prove herself to be. And, besides, he would be sincerely glad to see the old woman. The thought of her gave him a sense of comfort and security.
He saw Karen off next morning. She was to be at Les Solitudes for three or four days, and on the second day of her stay he had his first letter from her. It was strange to hear from her again, from Cornwall. It was the first letter he had had from Karen since their marriage and, with all its odd recalling of the girlish formality of tone, it was a sweet one. She had found Mrs. Talcott much better, but still quite weak and jaded, and very glad indeed to see her. And Mrs. Talcott really seemed to think that she would like to get away. Karen believed that Mrs. Talcott had actually been feeling lonely, uncharacteristic as that seemed. She would probably bring her back on Saturday. The letter ended: "My dear husband, your loving Karen."
Mrs. Talcott, therefore, was expected, and Mrs. Barker was told to make ready for her.
But on Saturday morning, when Karen was starting, he had a wire from her telling him that plans were altered and that she was coming back alone.
He went to meet her at Paddington, remembering the meeting when she had come up after their engagement. It was a different Karen, a Karen furred and finished and nearly elegant, who stepped from the train; but she had, as then, her little basket with the knitting and the book; and the girlish face was scarcely altered; there was even a preoccupation on it that recalled still more vividly the former meeting at Paddington. "Well, dearest, and why isn't Mrs. Talcott here, too?" were his first words.
Karen took his arm as he steered her towards the luggage. "It is only put off, I hope, that visit," she said, "because I heard this morning, Gregory, and wired to you then, that Tante asks if she may come to us next week." Her voice was not artificial; it expressed determination as well as gentleness and seemed to warn him that he must not show her if he were not pleased. Yet duplicity, in his unpleasant surprise, was difficult to assume.
"Really. At last. How nice," he said; and his voice rang oddly. "But poor old Mrs. Talcott. Madame von Marwitz didn't know, I suppose," he went on, "that we'd just been planning to have her?"
Karen, her arm still in his, stood looking over the heaped up luggage and now pointed out her box to the porter. Then, as they turned away and went towards their cab, she said, more gently and more determinedly: "Yes; she did know we had planned it. I wrote and told her so, and that is why she wrote back so quickly to ask if we could not put off Mrs. Talcott for her; because she will be leaving London very soon and it will be, this next week, her only chance of being with us. Mrs. Talcott did not mind at all. I don't think she really wanted to come so much, Gregory. It is as Tante says, you know," Karen settled herself in a corner of the hansom, "she really does not like leaving Les Solitudes."
Gregory had the feeling of being enmeshed. Why had Madame von Marwitz thrown this web? Had she really divined in a flash his hope and his intention? Was there any truth in her sudden statement that this was the only week she could give them? "Oh! Really," was all that he found to say to Karen's explanations, and then, "Where is Madame von Marwitz going when she leaves us then?"
"To the Riviera, with the Duchess of Bannister, I think it is arranged. I may wire to her, then, Gregory, at once, and say that she is to come?"
"Of course. How long are we to have the pleasure of entertaining her?"
"She did not say; for a week at least, I hope. Perhaps, even, for a fortnight if that will be convenient for you. It will be a great joy to me," Karen went on, "if only"—she was speaking with that determined steadiness, looking before her as they drove; now, suddenly, she turned her eyes on him "if only you will try to enjoy it, too, Gregory."
It was, in a sense, a challenge, yet it was, too, almost an appeal, and it brought them nearer than they had been for weeks.
Gregory's hand caught hers and, holding it tightly, smiling at her rather tremulously, he said: "I enjoy anything, darling, that makes you happy."
"Ah, but," said Karen, her voice keeping its earnest control, "I cannot be happy with you and Tante unless you can enjoy her for yourself. Try to know Tante, Gregory," she went on, now with a little breathlessness; "she wants that so much. One of the first things she asked me when she came back was that I should try to make you care for her. She felt at once—and oh! so did I, Gregory—that something was not happy between you."
Her hand holding his tightly, her earnest eyes on his, Gregory felt his blood turn a little cold as he recognized once more the soft, unremitting pressure. It had begun, then, so early. She had asked Karen that when she first came back. "But you see, dearest," he said, trying to keep his head between realizations of Madame von Marwitz's craft and Karen's candour, "I've never been able to feel that Madame von Marwitz wanted me to care for her or to come in at all, as it were. I don't mean anything unkind; only that I imagined that what she did ask of me was to keep outside and leave your relation and hers alone. And that's what I've tried to do."
"Oh, you mistake Tante, Gregory, you mistake her." Karen's hand grasped his more tightly in the urgency of her opportunity. "She cared for me too much—yes, it is there that you do not understand—to feel what you think. For she knows that I cannot be happy while you shut yourself away from her."
"Then it's not she who shuts me out?" he tried to smile.
"No; no; oh, no, Gregory."
"I must push in, even when I seem to feel I'm not wanted?"
She would not yield to his attempted lightness. "You mustn't push in; you must be in; with us, with Tante and me."
"Do you mean literally? I'm to be a third at yourtête-à-têtes?"
"No, Gregory, I do not mean that; but in thought, in sympathy. You will try to know Tante. You will make her feel that you and I are not parted when she is there."
She saw it all, all Tante's side, with a dreadful clearness. And it was impossible that she should see what he did. He must submit to seeming blurred and dull, to pretending not to see anything. At all events her hand was in his. He felt able to face the duel at close quarters with Madame von Marwitz as long as Karen let him keep her hand.
Tante arrived on Monday afternoon and the arrival reminded Gregory of the Bouddha's installation; but, whereas the Bouddha had overflowed the drawing-room only, Madame von Marwitz overflowed the flat.
A multitude of boxes were borne into the passages where, end to end, like a good's train on a main line, they stood impeding traffic.
Louise, harassed and sallow, hurried from room to room, expostulating, explaining, replying in shrill tones to Madame von Marwitz's sonorous orders. Victor, led by Mrs. Forrester's footman, made his appearance shortly after his mistress, and, set at large, penetrated unerringly to the kitchen where he lapped up a dish of custard; while Mrs. Barker, in the drawing-room, already with signs of resentment on her face, was receiving minute directions from Madame von Marwitz in regard to a cup of chocolate. In the dining-room, Gregory found two strange-looking men, to whom Barker, also clouded, had served whisky and soda; one of these was Madame von Marwitz's secretary, Schultz; the other a concert impresario. They greeted Gregory with a disconcerting affability.
In the midst of the confusion Madame von Marwitz moved, weary and benignant, her arm around Karen's shoulders, or seated herself at the piano to run her fingers appraisingly over it in a majestic surge of arpeggios. Gregory found her hat and veil tossed on the bed in his and Karen's room, and when he went into his dressing-room he stumbled over three band-boxes, just arrived from a modiste's, and hastily thrust there by Louise.
Victor bounded to greet him as he sought refuge in the library, and overturned a table that stood in the hall with two fine pieces of oriental china upon it. The splintering crash of crockery filled the flat. Mrs. Barker had taken the chocolate to the drawing-room some time since, and Madame von Marwitz, the cup in her hand, appeared upon the threshold with Karen. "Alas! The bad dog!" she said, surveying the wreckage while she sipped her chocolate.
Rose was summoned to sweep up the pieces and Karen stooped over them with murmured regret.
"Were they wedding-presents, my Karen?" Madame von Marwitz asked. "Console yourself; they were not of a good period—I noticed them. I will give you better."
The vases had belonged to Gregory's mother. He was aware that he stood rather blankly looking at the fragments, as Rose collected them. "Oh, Gregory, I am so sorry," said Karen, taking upon herself the responsibility for Victor's mischance. "I am afraid they are broken to bits. See, this is the largest piece of all. They can't be mended. No, Tante, they were not wedding-presents; they belonged to Gregory and we were very fond of them."
"Alas!" said Madame von Marwitz above her chocolate, and on a deeper note.
Gregory was convinced that she had known they were not wedding-presents. But her manner was flawless and he saw that she intended to keep it so. She dined with them alone and at the table addressed her talk to him, fixing, as ill-luck would have it, on the theatre as her theme, and onLa Gaine d'Oras the piece which, in Paris, had particularly interested her. "You and Karen, of course, saw it when you were there," she said.
It was the piece of sinister fame to which he had refused to take Karen. He owned that they had not seen it.
"Ah, but that is a pity, truly a pity," said Madame von Marwitz. "How did it happen? You cannot have failed to hear of it."
Unable to plead Karen as the cause for his abstention since Madame von Marwitz regretted that Karen had missed the piece, Gregory said that he had heard too much perhaps. "I don't believe I should care for anything the man wrote," he confessed.
"Tiens!" said Madame von Marwitz, opening her eyes. "You know him?"
"Heaven forbid!" Gregory ejaculated, smiling with some tartness.
"But why this rigour? What have you against M. Saumier?"
It was difficult for a young Englishman of conventional tastes to formulate what he had against M. Saumier. Gregory took refuge in evasions. "Oh, I've glanced at reviews of his plays; seen his face in illustrated papers. One gets an idea of a man's personality and the kind of thing he's likely to write."
"A great artist," Madame von Marwitz mildly suggested. "One of our greatest."
"Is he really? I'd hardly grasped that. I had an idea that he was merely one of the clever lot. But I never can see why one should put oneself, through a man's art, into contact with the sort of person one would avoid having anything to do with in life."
Madame von Marwitz listened attentively. "Do you refuse to look at a Cellini bronze?"
"Literature is different, isn't it? It's more personal. There's more life in it. If a man's a low fellow I don't interest myself in his interpretation of life. He's seen nothing that I'm likely to want to see."
Madame von Marwitz smiled, now with a touch of irony. "But you frighten me. How am I to tell you that I know M. Saumier?"
Gregory was decidedly taken back. "That's a penalty you have to pay for being a celebrity, no doubt," he said. "All celebrities know each other, I suppose."
"By no means. I allow no one to be thrust upon me, I assure you. And I have the greatest admiration for M. Saumier's talent. A great artist cannot be a low fellow; if he were one he would be so much more than that that the social defect would be negligible. Few great artists, I imagine, have been of such a character as would win the approval of a garden party at Lambeth Palace. I am sorry, indeed sorry, that you and Karen missedLa Gaine d'Or. It is not a play for thejeune fille; no; though, holding as I do that nothing so fortifies and arms the taste as liberty, I should have allowed Karen to see it even before her marriage. It is a play cruel and acrid and beautiful. Yes; there is great beauty, and it flowers, as so often, on a bitter root. Ah, well, you will waive your scruples now, I trust. I will take Karen with me to see it when we are next in Paris together, and that must be soon. We will go for a night or two. You would like to see Paris with me again;pas vrai, chérie?"
Gregory had been uncomfortably aware of Karen's contemplation while he defended his prejudices, and he was prepared for an open espousal of her guardian's point of view; it was, he knew, her own. But he received once more, as he had received already on several occasions, an unexpected and gratifying proof of Karen's recognition of marital responsibility. "I should like to be in Paris with you again, Tante," she said, "but not to go to that play. I agreed not to go to it when Gregory and I were there. I should not care to go when he so much dislikes it." Her eyes met her guardian's while she spoke. They were gentle and non-committal; they gave Gregory no cause for triumph, nor Tante for humiliation; they expressed merely her own recognition of a bond.
Madame von Marwitz rose to the occasion, but—oh, it was there, the soft pressure, never more present to Gregory's consciousness than when it seemed most absent—she rose too emphatically, as if to a need. Her eyes mused on the girl's face, tenderly brooded and understood. And Karen's voice and look had asked her not to understand.
"Ah, that is right; that is a wife," she murmured. "Though, believe me,chérie, I did not know that I was so transgressing." And turning her glance on Gregory, "Je vous fais mes compliments," she added.
Karen said that he must bring his cigar into the drawing-room, for Tante would smoke her cigarette with him, and there, until bedtime, things went as well as they had at dinner—or as badly; for part of their badness, Gregory more and more resentfully became aware, was that they were made to seem to go well, from her side, not from his.
She had a genius, veritably uncanny for, with all sweetness and hesitancy, revealing him as stiff and unresponsively complacent. It was impossible for him to talk freely with a person uncongenial to him of the things he felt deeply; and, pertinaciously, over her coffee and cigarettes, it was the deep things that she softly wooed him to share with her.
He might be stiff and stupid, but he flattered himself that he wasn't once short or sharp—as he would have been over and over again with any other woman who so bothered him. And he was sincerely unaware that his courtesy, in its dry evasiveness, was more repudiating than rudeness.
When Karen went with her guardian to her room that night, the little room that looked so choked and overcrowded with the great woman's multiplied necessities, Madame von Marwitz, sinking on the sofa, drew her to her and looked closely at her, with an intentness almost tragic, tenderly smoothing back her hair.
Karen looked back at her very firmly.
"Tell me, my child," Madame von Marwitz said, as if, suddenly, taking refuge in the inessential from the pressure of her own thoughts, "how did you find our Tallie? I have not heard of that from you yet."
"She is looking rather pale and thin, Tante; but she is quite well again; already she will go out into the garden," Karen answered, with, perhaps, an evident relief.
"That is well," said Madame von Marwitz with quiet satisfaction. "That is well. I cannot think of Tallie as ill. She is never ill. It is perhaps the peaceful, happy life she leads—povera—that preserves her. And the air, the wonderful air of our Cornwall. I fixed on Cornwall for the sake of Tallie, in great part; I sought for a truly halcyon spot where that faithful one might end her days in joy. You knew that, Karen?"
"No, Tante; you never told me that."
"It is so," Madame von Marwitz continued to muse, her eyes on the fire, "It is so. I have given great thought to my Tallie's happiness. She has earned it." And after a moment, in the same quiet tone, she went on. "This idea of yours, my Karen, of bringing Tallie up to town; was it wise, do you think?"
Karen, also, had been looking at the flames. She brought her eyes now back to her guardian. "Wasn't it wise, Tante? We had asked her to come and stay—long ago, you know."
"Had she seemed eager?"
"Eager? No; I can't imagine Mrs. Talcott eager about anything. We hoped we could persuade her, that was all. Why not wise, Tante?"
"Only, my child, that after the quiet life there, the solitude that she loves and that I chose for her sake, the pure sea air and the life among her flowers, London, I fear, would much weary and fatigue her. Tallie is getting old. We must not forget that Tallie is very old. This illness warns us. It does not seem to me a good plan. It was your plan, Karen?"
Karen was listening, with a little bewilderment. "It seemed, to me very good. I had not thought of Mrs. Talcott as so old as that. I always think of her as old, but so strong and tough. It was Gregory who suggested it, in the first place, and this time, too. When I told him that I was going he thought of our plan at once and told me that now I must persuade her to come to us for a good long visit. He is really very fond of Mrs. Talcott, Tante, and she of him, I think. It would please you to see them together."
Karen spoke on innocently; but, as she spoke, she became aware from a new steadiness in her guardian's look, that her words had conveyed some significance of which she was herself unconscious.
Madame von Marwitz's hand had tightened on hers. "Ah," she said after a moment. She looked away.
"What is it, Tante?" Karen asked.
Madame von Marwitz had begun to draw deep, slow breaths. Karen knew the sound; it meant a painful control. "Tante, what is it?" she repeated.
"Nothing. Nothing, my child." Madame von Marwitz laid her arm around Karen's shoulders and continued to look away from her.
"But it isn't nothing," said Karen, after a little pause. "Something that I have said troubles or hurts you."
"Is it so? Perhaps you say the truth, my child. Hurts are not new to me. No, my Karen, no. It is nothing for us to speak of. I understand. But your husband, Karen, he must have found it thoughtless in me, indelicate, to force myself in when he had hoped so strongly for another guest."
A slow flush mounted to Karen's cheek. She kept silence for a moment, then in a careful voice she said: "No, Tante; I do not believe that."
"No?" said Madame von Marwitz. "No, my Karen?"
"He knew, on the contrary, that I hoped to have you soon—at any time that you could come," said Karen, in slightly trembling tones.
Madame von Marwitz nodded. "He knew that, as you tell me; and, knowing it, he asked Tallie; hoping that with her installed—for a long visit—my stay might be prevented. Do not let us hide from each other, my Karen. We have hidden too long and it is the beginning of the end if we may not say to each other what we see."
Sitting with downcast eyes, Karen was silent, struggling perhaps with new realisations.
Madame von Marwitz bent to kiss her forehead and then, resuming the tender stroking of her hair, she went on: "Your husband dislikes me. Let us look the ugly thing full in the face. You know it, and I know it, and—parbleu!—he knows it well. There; the truth is out. Ah, the brave little heart; it sought to hide its sorrow from me. But Tante is not so dull a person. The loneliness of heart must cease for you. And the sorrow, too, may pass away. Be patient, Karen. You will see. He may come to feel more kindly towards the woman who so loves his wife. Strange, is it not, and a chastisement for my egotism, if I have still any of that frothy element lingering in my nature, that I should find, suddenly, at the end of my life—so near me, bound to me by such ties—one who is unwilling to trust me, oh, for the least little bit; so unwilling to accept me at merely my face value. Most people," she added, "have loved me easily."
Karen sat on in silence. Her guardian knew this apathetic silence, and that it was symptomatic in her of deep emotion. And, the contagion of the suffering beside her gaining upon her, her own fictitious calm wavered. She bent again to look into the girl's averted face. "Karen,chérie," she said, and now with a quicker utterance; "it is not worse than I yet realise? You do not hide something that I have not yet seen. It is dislike; I accept it. It is aversion, even. But his love for you; that is strong, sincere? He will not make it too difficult for me? I am not wrong in coming here to be with my child?"
Karen at length turned her eyes on her guardian with a heavy look. "What would you find too difficult?" she asked.
Madame von Marwitz hesitated slightly, taken aback. But she grasped in an instant her advantage. "That by being here I should feel that I came between you and your husband. That by being here I made it more difficult for you."
"I should not be happier if you were away—if what you think is true, should I?" said Karen.
"Yes, my child," Madame von Marwitz returned, and now almost with severity. "You would. You would not so sharply feel your husband's aversion for me if I were not here. You would not have it in your ears; before your eyes."
"I thought that you talked together quite easily to-night," Karen continued. "I saw, of course, that you did not understand each other; but with time that might be. I thought that if you were here he would by degrees come to know you, for he does not know you yet."
"We talked easily, did we not, my child, to shield you, and you were not more deceived by the ease than he or I. He does not understand me? I hope so indeed. But to say that I do not understand him shows already your wish to shield him, and at my expense. I do understand him; too well. And if there is this repugnance in him now, may it not grow with the enforced intimacy? That is my fear, my dread."
"He has never said that he disliked you."
"Said it? To you? I should imagine not,parbleu!"
"He has only said," Karen pursued with a curious doggedness, "that he did not feel that you cared for him to care."
"Ah! Is it so? You have talked of it, then? And he has said that? And did you believe it? Of me?"
But the growing passion and urgency of her voice seemed to shut Karen more closely in upon herself rather than sweep her into impulsive confidence. There was a hot exasperation in Madame von Marwitz's eye as it studied the averted, stubborn head. "No," was the reply she received.
"No, no, indeed. It was not the truth that he said to you and you know that it was not the truth. Oh, I make no accusation against your husband; he believed it the truth; but you cannot believe that I would rest satisfied with what must make you unhappy. And how can you be happy if your husband does not care for me? How can you be happy if he feels repugnance for me? You cannot be. Is it not so? Or am I wrong?"
"No," Karen again repeated.
"Then," said Madame von Marwitz, and a sob now lifted her voice, "then do not let him put it upon me. Not that! Oh promise me, my Karen! For that would be the end."
Karen turned to her suddenly, and passed her arms around her. "Tante—Tante," she said; "what are you saying? The end? There could not be an end for us! Do not speak so. Do not. Do not." She was trembling.
"Ah—could there not! Could there not!" With the words Madame von Marwitz broke into violent sobs. "Has it not been my doom, always—always to have what I love taken from me! You love this man who hates me! You defend him! He will part you from me! I foresee it! From the first it has been my dread!"
"No one can ever part us, Tante. No one. Ever." Karen whispered, holding her tightly, and her face, bending above the sobbing woman, was suddenly old and stricken in its tormented and almost maternal love. "Tante; remember your own words. You gave me courage. Will you not be patient? For my sake? Be patient, Tante. Be patient. He does not know you yet."
Gregory heard no word of the revealing talk; yet, when he and Karen were alone, he was aware of a new chill, or a new discretion, in the atmosphere. It was as if a veil of ice, invisible yet impassable, hung between them, and he could only infer that she had something to hide, he could only suspect, with a bitterer resentment, that Madame von Marwitz had been more directly exerting her pressure.
The pressure, whatever it had been, had the effect of making Karen, when they were all three confronted, more calm, more mildly cheerful than before, more than ever the fond wife who did not even suspect that a flaw might be imagined in her happiness.
Gregory had an idea—his only comfort in this sorry maze where he found himself so involved—that this attitude of Karen's, combined with his own undeviating consideration, had a disconcerting effect upon Madame von Marwitz and at moments induced her to show her weapon too openly in their wary duel. If he ever betrayed his dislike Karen must see that it was Tante who wouldn't allow him to conceal it, who, sorrowfully and gently, turned herself about in the light she elicited and displayed herself to Karen as rejected and uncomplaining. He hoped that Karen saw it. But he could be sure of nothing that Karen saw. The flawless loyalty of her outward bearing might be but the shield for a deepening hurt. All that he could do was what, in former days and in different conditions, Mrs. Talcott had advised him to do; "hang on," and parry Madame von Marwitz's thrusts. She had come, he more and more felt sure of it, urged by her itching jealousy, for the purpose of making mischief; and if it was not a motive of which she was conscious, that made her but the more dangerous with her deep, instinctive craft.
Meanwhile if there were fundamental anxieties to fret one's heart, there were superficial irritations that abraded one's nerves.
Karen was accustomed to the turmoil that surrounded the guarded shrine where genius slept or worked, too much accustomed, without doubt, to realise its effect upon her husband.
The electric bells were never silent. Seated figures, bearing band-boxes or rolls of music, filled the hall at all hours of the day and night. Alert interviewers button-holed him on his way in and out and asked for a few details about Mrs. Jardine's youth, and her relationship to Madame Okraska.
Madame von Marwitz rose capriciously and ate capriciously; trays with strange meals upon them were carried at strange hours to her rooms, and Barker, Mrs. Barker and Rose all quarrelled with Louise.
Madame von Marwitz also showed oddities of temper which, with all her determination to appear at her best, it did not occur to her to control, oddities that met, from Karen, with a fond tolerance.
It startled Gregory when they saw Madame von Marwitz, emerging from her room, administer two smart boxes upon Louise's ears, remarking as she did so, with gravity rather than anger: "Voilà pour toi, ma fille."
"Is Madame von Marwitz in the habit of slapping her servants?" he asked Karen in their room, aware that his frigid mien required justification.
She looked at him through the veil of ice. "Tante's servants adore her."
"Well, it seems a pity to take such an advantage of their adoration."
"Louise is sometimes very clumsy and impertinent."
"I can't help thinking that that sort of treatment makes servants impertinent."
"I do not care to hear your criticism of my guardian, Gregory."
"I beg your pardon," said Gregory.
Betty Jardine met him on a windy April evening in Queen Anne's Gate. "I see that you had to sacrifice me, Gregory," she said. She smiled; she bore no grudge; but her smile was tinged with a shrewd pity.
He felt that he flushed. "You mean that you've not been to see us since the occasion."
"I've not been asked!" Betty laughed.
"Madame von Marwitz is with us, you know," Gregory proffered rather lamely.
"Yes; I do know. How do you like having a genius domiciled? I hear that she is introducing Karen into a very artistic set. After the Bannisters, Mr. Claude Drew. He is back from America at last, it seems, and is an assiduous adorer. You have seen a good deal of him?"
"I haven't seen him at all. Has he been back for long?"
"Four or five days only, I believe; but I don't know how often he and Madame von Marwitz and Karen have been seen together. Don't think me a cat, Gregory; but if she is engaged in a flirtation with that most unpleasant young man I hope you will see to it that Karen isn't used as a screen. There have been some really horrid stories about him, you know."
Gregory parted from his sister-in-law, perturbed. Indiscreet and naughty she might be, but Betty was not a cat. The veil of ice was so impenetrable that no sound of Karen's daily life came to him through it. He had not an idea of what she did with herself when he wasn't there, or, rather, of what Madame von Marwitz did with her.
"You've been seeing something of Mr. Claude Drew, I hear," he said to Karen that evening. "Do you like him better than you used to do?" They were in the drawing-room before dinner and dinner had been, as usual, waiting for half an hour for Madame von Marwitz.
Gregory's voice betrayed more than a kindly interest, and Karen answered coldly, if without suspicion; "No; I do not like him better. But Tante likes him. It is not I who see him, it is Tante. I am only with them sometimes."
"And I? Am I to be with them sometimes?" Gregory inquired with an air of gaiety.
"If you will come back to tea to-morrow, Gregory," she answered gravely, "you will meet him. He comes to tea then."
For the last few days Gregory had fallen into the habit of only getting back in time for dinner. "You know it's only because I usually find that you've gone out with your guardian that I haven't come back in time for tea," he observed.
"I know," Karen returned, without aggressiveness. "And so, to-morrow, you will find us if you come."
He got back at tea-time next day, expecting to make a fourth only of the small group; but, on his way to the drawing-room, he paused, arrested, in the hall, where a collection of the oddest looking hats and coats he had ever seen were piled and hung.
One of the hats was a large, discoloured, cream-coloured felt, much battered, with its brown band awry; one was of the type of flat-brimmed silk, known in Paris as theLatin Quartier; another was an enormous sombrero. Gregory stood frowning at these strange signs somewhat as if they had been a drove of cockroaches. He had, as never yet before, the sense of an alien and offensive invasion of his home, and an old, almost forgotten disquiet smote upon him in the thought that what to him was strange was to Karen normal. This was her life and she had never really entered his.
In the drawing-room, he paused again at the door, and looked over the company assembled under the Bouddha's smile. Madame von Marwitz was its centre; pearl-wreathed, silken and silver, she leaned opulently on the cushions of the sofa where she sat, and Karen at the tea-table seemed curiously to have relapsed into the background place where he had first found her. She was watching, with her old contented placidity, a scene in which she had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them, the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main, Bohemians, they were not, in the main, shoddy.
Belot was there, with his massive head and sagacious eyes; and a famous actress, ugly, thin, with a long, slightly crooked face, tinted hair, and the melancholy, mysterious eyes of a llama. Claude Drew, at a little table behind Madame von Marwitz, negligently turned the leaves of a book. Lady Rose Harding, the only one of the company with whom Gregory felt an affinity, though a dubious one, talked to the French actress and to Madame von Marwitz. Lady Rose had ridden across deserts on camels, and sketched strange Asiatic mountains, and paid a pilgrimage to Tolstoi, and written books on all these exploits; and she had been to the Adirondacks that summer with the Aspreys and Madame von Marwitz, and was now writing a book on that. In a corner a vast, though youthful, German Jew, with finely crisped red-gold hair, large lips and small, kind eyes blinking near-sightedly behind gold-rimmed spectacles, sat with another young man, his hands on his widely parted knees, in an attitude suggesting a capacity to cope with the most unwieldy instruments of an orchestra; his companion, black and emaciated, talked in German, with violent gestures and a strange accent, jerking constantly a lock of hair out of his eyes. A squat, fat little woman, bundled up, clasping her knees with her joined hands, sat on a footstool at Madame von Marwitz's feet, gazing at her and listening to her with a smile of obsequious attention, and now and then, suddenly, and as if irrelevantly, breaking into a jubilant laugh. Her dusty hair looked as though, like the White Queen's, a comb and brush might be entangled in its masses; the low cut neck of her bodice displayed a ruddy throat wreathed in many strings of dirty seed-pearls, and her grey satin dress was garnished with dirty lace.
Gregory had stood for an appreciable moment at the door surveying the scene, before either Karen or her guardian saw him, and it was then the latter who did the honours of the occasion, naming him to the bundled lady, who was an English poetess, and to Mlle. Suzanne Mauret, the French actress. The inky-locked youth turned out to be a famous Russian violinist, and the vast young German Jew none other than Herr Franz Lippheim, to whom—this was the fact that at once, violently, engaged Gregory's attention—Madame von Marwitz had destined Karen.
Franz Lippheim, after Gregory had spoken to everybody and when he at last was introduced, sprang to his feet and came forward, beaming so intently from behind his spectacles that Gregory, fearing that he might, conceivably, be about to kiss him, made an involuntary gesture of withdrawal. But Herr Lippheim, all unaware, grasped his hand the more vigorously. "Our little Karen's husband!" "Unserer kleinen Karen's Mann!" he uttered in a deeply moved German.
In the driest of tones Gregory asked Karen for some tea, and while he stood above her Herr Lippheim's beam continued to include them both.
"Sit down here, Franz, near me," said Karen. She, too, had smiled joyously as Herr Lippheim greeted her husband. The expression of her face now had changed.
Herr Lippheim obeyed, placing, as before, his hands on his knees, the elbows turned outward, and contemplating Karen's husband with a gaze that might have softened a heart less steeled than Gregory's.
This, then, was Madame von Marwitz's next move; her next experiment in seeing what she could "do." Was not Herr Lippheim a taunt? And with what did he so unpleasantly associate the name of the French actress? The link clicked suddenly.La Gaine d'Or, in its veiling French, was about to be produced in London, and it was Mlle. Mauret who had created the heroine's role in Paris. These were the people by means of whom Madame von Marwitz displayed her power over Karen's life;—a depraved woman (he knew and cared nothing about Mlle. Mauret's private morality; she was the more repulsive to him if her morals weren't bad; only a woman of no morals should be capable of acting inLa Gaine d'Or;) that impudent puppy Drew, and this preposterous young man who addressed Karen by her Christian name and included himself in his inappropriate enthusiasm.
He drank his tea, standing in silence by Karen's side, and avoiding all encounter with Herr Lippheim's genial eyes.
"It is like old times, isn't it, Franz?" said Karen, ignoring her husband and addressing her former suitor. "It has been—oh, years—since I have heard such talk. Tante needs all of you, really, to draw her out. She has been wonderful this afternoon, hasn't she?"
"Ah, kolossal!" said Herr Lippheim, making no gesture, but expressing the depths of his appreciation by an emphasized solemnity of gaze.
"You are right, I think, and so does Tante, evidently," Karen continued, "about thetempo rubatoin the Mozart. It is strange that Monsieur Ivanowski doesn't feel it."
"Ah! but that is it, he does feel it; it is only that he does not think it," said Herr Lippheim, now running his fingers through his hair. "Hear him play the Mozart. He then contradicts in his music all that his words have said."
But though Karen talked so pointedly to him, Herr Lippheim could not keep his eyes or his thoughts from Gregory. "You are a musician, too, Mr. Jardine?" he smiled, bending forward, blinking up through his glasses and laboriously carving out his excellent English. "You do not express, but you have the soul of an artist? Or perhaps you, too, play, like our Karen here."
"No," Gregory returned, with a chill utterance. "I know nothing about music."
"Is it so, Karen?" Herr Lippheim questioned, his guileless warmth hardly tempered.
"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.
It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who had gained Karen's heart,—"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr. Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"
"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding; yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.
"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"—she again excluded her husband;—"It is just finished."
Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in preoccupied tones, "Kolossal!"
They talked, and Gregory stood above them, aloof from their conversation frigidly gazing over the company, his elbow in his hand, his neat fingers twisting his moustache. If he was giving Madame von Marwitz a handle against him he couldn't help it. Over the heads of Karen and Herr Lippheim his eyes for a moment encountered hers. They looked at each other steadily and neither feigned a smile.
Eleanor Scrotton arrived at six, flushed and flustered.
"Thank heaven, I haven't missed her!" she said to Gregory, to whom, to-day, Eleanor was an almost welcome sight. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Mlle. Mauret. "Have you had a talk with her yet?"
"I haven't had a talk and I yield my claim to you," said Gregory. "Are you very eager to meet the lady?"
"Who wouldn't be, my dear Gregory! What a wonderful face! What thought and suffering! Oh, it has been the most extraordinary of stories. You don't know? Well, I will tell you about her some time. She is, doubtless, one of the greatest living actresses. And she is still quite young. Barely forty."
He watched Eleanor make her way to the actress's side, reflecting sardonically upon the modern growths of British tolerance. Half the respectable matrons in London would, no doubt, take their girls to seeLa Gaine d'Or; mercifully, they would in all probability not understand it; but if they did, was there anything that inartistic London would not swallow in its terror of being accused of philistinism?
The company was dispersing. Herr Lippheim stood holding Karen's hands saying, as she shook them, that he would bringdas Mütterchenanddie Schwesterchento-morrow. Belot came for a last cup of tea and drank it in sonorous draughts, exchanging a few words with Gregory. He had nothing against Belot. Mr. Drew leaned on Madame von Marwitz's sofa and spoke to her in a low voice while she looked at him inscrutably, her eyes half closed.
"Lucky man," said Lady Rose to Gregory, on her way out, "to have her under your roof. I hope you are a scrupulous Boswell and taking notes." In the hall Barker was assorting the sombrero, theLatin Quartierand the cream-coloured felt; the last belonged to Herr Lippheim, who was putting it on when Gregory escorted Lady Rose to the door.
Gregory gave the young man a listless hand. He couldn't forgive Herr Lippheim. That he should ever, under whatever encouragements from Karen's guardian, have dared to aspire to her, was a monstrous fact.
He watched the thick rims of Herr Lippheim's ears, under the cream-coloured felt, descending in the lift and wondered if the sight was to be often inflicted upon him.
When he went back to the drawing-room, Karen was alone. Madame von Marwitz had taken Miss Scrotton to her own room. Karen was standing by the tea-table, looking down at it, her hands on the back of the chair from which she had risen to say good-bye to her guardian's guests. She raised her eyes as her husband came in and they rested on him with a strange expression.
"Will you shut the door, Gregory?" Karen said. "I want to speak to you." The feeling with which he looked at her was that with which he had faced her sleeping, as he thought, after their former dispute. The sense of failure and disillusion was upon him. As before, it was only of her guardian that she was thinking. He knew that he had given Madame von Marwitz a handle against him.
He obeyed her and when he came and stood before her she went on. "Before we all meet at dinner again, I must ask you something. Do not make your contempt of Tante's guests—and of mine—more plain to her than you have already done this afternoon."
"Did I make it plain?" Gregory asked, after a moment.
"I think that if I felt it so strongly, Tante must have felt it," said Karen, and to this, after another pause, Gregory found nothing further to say than "I'm sorry."
"I hardly think," said Karen, holding the back of her chair tightly and looking down again while she spoke, "that you can have realized that Herr Lippheim is not only Tante's friend, but mine. I don't think you can have realized how you treated him. I know that he is very simple and unworldly; but he is good and kind and faithful; he is a true artist—almost a great one, and he has the heart of a child. And beside him, while you were hurting and bewildering him so to-day, you looked to me—how shall I say it—petty, yes, and foolish, yes, and full of self-conceit."
The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words, deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself, as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was the overpowering fact.
"I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said.
"Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree."
"Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt.
"I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen, "to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it."
"And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you surrounded by—this rabble."
"Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen.
"I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,—I wouldn't have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a possible husband for you." Gregory imagined that he was speaking carefully and choosing his words, but he was aware that his anger coloured his voice. He had also been aware, some little time before, in a lower layer of consciousness, of the stir and rustle of steps and dresses in the passage outside—Madame von Marwitz conducting Eleanor Scrotton to the door. And now—had she actually been listening, or did his words coincide with the sudden opening of the door?—Madame von Marwitz herself appeared upon the threshold.
Her face made the catastrophe all too evident. She had heard him. She had, he felt convinced, crept quietly back and stood to listen before entering. His memory reconstructed the long pause between the departing rustle and this apparition.
Madame von Marwitz's face had its curious look of smothered heat. The whites of her eyes were suffused though her cheeks were pale.
"I must apologise," she said. "I overheard you as I entered, Mr. Jardine, and what I heard I cannot ignore. What is it that you say to Karen? What is it that you say of the man I thought of as a possible husband for her?"
She advanced into the room and laying her arm round Karen's shoulders she stood confronting him.
"I don't think I can discuss this with you," said Gregory. "I am very sorry that you overheard me." The slight smile of his pain had gone. He looked at Madame von Marwitz with a flinty eye.
"Ah, but you must discuss it; you shall," said Madame von Marwitz. "You say things to my child that I am not to overhear. You seek to poison her mind against me. You take her from me and then blacken me in her eyes. A possible husband! Would to God," said Madame von Marwitz, with sombre fury, "that the possibility had been fulfilled! Would to God that it were my brave, deep-hearted Franz who were her husband—not you, most ungrateful, most ungenerous of men."
"Tante," said Karen, who still stood looking down, grasping her chair-back and encircled by her guardian's arm, "he did not mean you to hear him. Forgive him."
"I beg your pardon, Karen," said Gregory, "I am very sorry that Madame von Marwitz overheard me; but I have said nothing for which I wish to apologize."
"Ah! You hear him!" cried Madame von Marwitz, and the inner conflagration now glittered in her eyes like flames behind the windows of a burning house. "You hear him, Karen? Forgive him! How can I forgive him when he has made you wretched! How can I ever forgive him when he tears your life by thrusting me forth from it—me—and everything I am and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen—you have seen my efforts to win your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his half-hidden insolence. Never—ah, never in my life have I faced such humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof—humiliations, endured for your sake, Karen—for yours only! Ah"—releasing Karen suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry, stretching out her arm—"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting your room! Did I not see it! You!justes cieux!with your bourgeois little world; your little—little world—so small—so small! your people like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never! there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart—ah, I know it—will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod upon and broken!"
With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate tears.
Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.
"My dear," said Gregory—their voices seemed to pass above the clash and uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an elemental grief—"I have nothing to say to your guardian."
"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back, permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would marry?"
Gregory paused, and in the pause, as he observed, Madame von Marwitz was able to withhold for a moment her strange groans and gaspings while she listened. "I don't think there has been any such effort," he said. "We were both keeping up appearances, your guardian and I; and I think that I kept them up best. As for Herr Lippheim, it was only when you accused me of rudeness to him that I confessed how much it astonished me to find that he was the man your guardian had wished you to marry. It does astonish me. Herr Lippheim isn't even a gentleman."
"Enough!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sprang to her feet. "Enough!" she said, half suffocated. "It is the voice of the cage! We will not stay to hear its standards applied. Come with me, Karen, that I may say farewell to you."
She caught Karen by the arm. Her face was strange, savage, suffused. Gregory went to open the door for them. "Base one!" she said to him. "Ignominious one!"
She drew Karen swiftly along the passage and, still keeping her sharp clasp of her wrist while she opened and closed the door of her room, she sank, encircling her with her arms, upon the sofa, and wept loudly over her.
Karen, too, was now weeping; heavy, shaking sobs.
"My child! My poor child!" Madame von Marwitz murmured brokenly after a little time had gone. "I would have spared you this. It has come. We have both seen it. And now, so that your life may not be ruined, I must leave it."
"But Tante—my Tante—" sobbed Karen—Madame von Marwitz did not remember that Karen had ever so sobbed before—"you cannot mean those words. What shall I do if you say this? What is left for me?"
"My child, your life is left you," said Madame von Marwitz, holding her close and speaking with her lips in the girl's hair. "Your husband's love is left; the happiness that you chose and that I shall shatter if I stay; ah, yes, my Karen, how deny it now? I see my path. It is plain before me. To-night I go to Mrs. Forrester and to-morrow I breathe the air of Cornwall."
"But Tante—wait—wait. You will see Gregory again? You will let him explain? Oh, let me first talk with him! He says bitter things, but so do you, Tante; and he does not mean to offend as much as you think."
At this, after a little pause, Madame von Marwitz drew herself slightly away and put her handkerchief to her eyes and cheeks. The violence of her grief was over. "Does he still so blind you, Karen?" she then asked. "Do you still not see that your husband hates me—and has hated me from the beginning?"
"Not hate!—Not hate!" Karen sobbed. "He does not understand you—that is all. Only wait—till to-morrow. Only let me talk to him!"
"No. He does not understand. That is evident," said Madame von Marwitz with a bitter smile. "Nor will he ever understand. Will you talk to him, Karen, so that he shall explain why he smirches my love and my sincerity? You know as well as I what was the meaning of those words of his. Can you, loving me, ask me to sue further for the favour of a man who has so insulted me? No. It cannot be. I cannot see him again. You and I are still to meet, I trust; but it cannot again be under this roof."
Karen now sobbed helplessly, leaning forward, her face in her hands, and Madame von Marwitz, again laying an arm around her shoulders, gazed with majestic sorrow into the fire. "Even so," she said at last, when Karen's sobs had sunken to long, broken breaths; "even so. It is the law of life. Sacrifice: sacrifice: to the very end. Life, to the artist, must be this altar where he lays his joys. We are destined to be alone, Karen. We are driven forth into the wilderness for the sins of the people. So I have often seen it, and cried out against it in my tortured youth, and struggled against it in my strength and in my folly. But now, with another strength, I am enabled to stand upright and to face the vision of my destiny. I am to be alone. So be it."
No answer came, from Karen and Madame von Marwitz, after a pause, continued, in gentler, if no less solemn tones: "And my child, too, is brave. She, too, will stand upright. She, too, has her destiny to fulfil—in the world—not in the wilderness. And if the burden should ever grow too heavy, and the road cut her feet too sharply, and the joy turn to dust, she will remember—always—that Tante's arms and heart are open to her—at all times, in all places, and to the end of life. And now," this, with a sigh of fatigue, came on a more matter-of-fact note—"let a cab be called for me. Louise will follow with my boxes."
Karen's tears had ceased. She made no further protest or appeal.
Rising, she dried her eyes, rang and ordered the cab to be called and found her guardian's white cloak and veiled hat.
And while she shrouded her in these, Madame von Marwitz, still gazing, as if at visions, in the fire, lifted her arms and bent her head with almost the passivity of a dead thing. Once or twice she murmured broken phrases: "My ewe-lamb;—taken;—I am very weary.Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,—and is this, then, the end...."
She rested heavily on Karen's shoulder in rising. "Forgive me," she said, leaning her head against hers, "forgive me, beloved one. I have done harm where I meant to make a safer happiness. Forgive me, too, for my bitter words. I should not have spoken as I did. My child knows that it is a hot and passionate heart."
Karen, in silence, turned her face to her guardian's breast.
"And do not," said Madame von Marwitz, speaking with infinite tenderness, while she stroked the bent head, "judge your husband too hardly because of this. He gives what love he can; as he knows love. It is as my child said; he does not understand. It is not given to some to understand. He has lived in a narrow world. Do not judge him hardly, Karen; it is for the wiser, stronger, more loving soul to lift the smaller towards the light. He can still give my child happiness. In that trust I find my strength."
They went down the passage together. Gregory came to the drawing-room door. He would have spoken, have questioned, but, shrinking from him and against Karen, as if from an intolerable searing, Madame von Marwitz hastened past him. He heard the front door open and the last silent pause of farewell on the threshold.
Louise scuttled by past him to her mistress's vacated rooms. She did not see him and he heard that she muttered under her breath: "Ah! par exemple! C'est trop fort, ma parole d'honneur!"
As Karen came back from the door he went to meet her.
"Karen," he said, "will you come and talk with me, now?"
She put aside his hand. "I cannot talk. Do not come to me," she said. "I must think." And going into their room she shut the door.